


felled by you, held by you

by nebulastucky



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5 Things, Domestic Bliss, Established Relationship, Flashbacks, Getting Together, M/M, Stan Lee cameo if you squint, Talk Shows, bucky barnes pop culture connoisseur, bucky is an ariana grande stan because i said so, endgame definitely dont interact, infinity war dont interact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 22:56:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17886719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulastucky/pseuds/nebulastucky
Summary: Bucky doesn’t know when it happened. He doesn’t know when he stopped needing help, when he stopped being broken.When did his life go from pain and bloodshed and ice and bullets to friends and home cooked meals and Captain America smiling at him just because he’s there?or: 5 First Times that became Steve and Bucky's All-The-Time





	felled by you, held by you

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to ao3 user theatrythms for calling this fic "tender" at every available opportunity, to real life user carla for proofreading it two hours ago, and to the whole girls night groupchat for swooning with me over my own writing. love u gals
> 
> title taken from hozier's NFWMB

Bucky doesn’t know when it happened. He doesn’t know when he stopped needing help, when he stopped being broken.

Steve probably knows. He watched Bucky like a hawk for months - Bucky doesn’t think he slept at all those first few weeks - like if he blinked Bucky would be gone again, or the Winter Soldier would be back in his place and they’d have to start over, or any number of other disaster scenarios that kept him awake at night.

And Bucky can’t exactly  _ ask,  _ not here at the dinner table. Not with Sam and Clint and Natasha here. Not with Steve smiling into the meatballs Bucky spent forty minutes shaping just right before letting them burn a little because he got distracted by an infomercial about a blanket with sleeves. Not with Steve looking at him, now, with light in his eyes instead of heartache and pasta sauce on his lips instead of a frown.

He sits and listens to the rest of them talk, about old missions and new movies and whatever nonsense science fiction concept Tony’s trying to bring to life this week, but there’s this voice in the back of his head - not the Asset or the bastards that rewired his thoughts, they’ve been quiet for a while - asking when it got like this.

When did his life go from pain and bloodshed and ice and bullets to friends and home cooked meals and Captain America smiling at him just because he’s there?

They move to the couch after dinner. Steve suggests ice cream, and everyone else says it’s the middle of November, are you out of your mind, but Bucky says yes, so Steve goes out for ice cream. 

There’s a place down the block that manages to stay open all year round solely because it’s down the block from two super soldiers. It’s not the best place in the city, but it’s the closest, and that counts for a lot when there’s someone else picking what’s on TV when you come home.

Tonight is Friday night, so that means talk shows and,  _ god _ , a lot of them. It’s a good way to get Steve and Bucky caught up on the 21st century, sure, but there’s only so many times Bucky can watch this James Corden guy pretend to drive around Los Angeles with a celebrity.

(They had him fooled for a little while, but he found an article online where Jacqueline from  _ Kimmy Schmidt _  said they just drive around one block over and over. That kind of killed the magic. He still likes the one with Michelle Obama, though.)

 

* * *

 

  1. **breakfast**



 

The first time Bucky sits down for a meal with Steve is breakfast on a Tuesday, two weeks after moving in. 

Steve makes every meal for him every day, and always sets him a place. Most days he takes the plate back to his room to eat there. Some days that’s the only time he leaves his room. Some days he doesn’t even do that.

It’s pancakes, in the weird French way - Bucky doesn’t know how he knows it’s the French way - with sugar and lemon and berries and chocolate syrup and no air. He makes for the plate, but his hand finds the back of the chair instead, and then he’s sitting.

He doesn’t remember making a decision, but here he is, and it’s okay. It’s  _ okay. _

Steve, across the tiny table, makes a face like he doesn’t know what’s going on, either. When Bucky doesn’t stand up, his expression clears into something Bucky doesn’t exactly recognise, but something bone-deep inside him says he’s seen it before.

He piles his plate high with fruit that shouldn’t even be in season this time of year. He doesn’t know how he knows that, either.

They eat in thick silence. Bucky can feel Steve trying not to look at him the whole time, can feel him  _ wanting _ to say something, anything. It’s painful, in a weird way, to have those eyes both on him and anywhere but.

Objectively, Bucky knows he’s the most important thing in the world to Steve right now. It would be hard to have a volatile and unstable ex-assassin living in your spare room and not have it be a priority. The Winter Soldier is high on a lot of people’s list of concerns. He just doesn’t understand why Bucky Barnes would be.

When the jug of orange juice between them runs low and he feels like the quiet is smothering him, Bucky finally speaks, and he asks, “Do you want coffee?”

It’s probably the most words he’s said in a row since he moved in. He’s not looking at Steve when he says it, either, he’s staring right at the coffee pot in the kitchen, just over Steve’s shoulder.

Steve swallows the last of his juice, hard, and splutters out, “yeah, please,” so Bucky stands, letting his chair squeak against the hardwood floor. He’s gotten better at not  _ stalking  _ everywhere he goes, like every destination is the bullseye on a target and he’s the bullet, and that’s what he thinks about when he takes the few steps he needs to get to the coffee pot, to keep him from thinking about Steve watching him go.

He pours the coffee, still hot, into a chipped mug with Tony Stark’s face on it, and finally makes - lets - himself look at Steve. He’s got the beginnings of a smile on his lips, and it distracts Bucky long enough that he nearly lets the mug overflow.

Their fingers brush in the hand-off, flesh and bone against harsh metal, and then Steve’s ghost of a smile is gone but his cheeks are a tiny bit rosy. Bucky doesn’t sit down again.

He goes back to his room and wonders if Steve noticed he didn’t get any coffee for himself.

 

* * *

  
  


When Steve gets back, there’s bickering. There’s always bickering.

He grabs two spoons from the kitchen before he drops like a sack of bricks onto the sofa next to Bucky. Bucky takes the ice cream and the spoon offered to him, gives Steve a quick, “thanks,” and goes right back to spitting words at Clint.

“Look, Barton, we have this argument every time you’re here,” he says, “and you always say the same shit. Beyoncé peaked with her self-titled album _.  _ You know it and I know it, even Steve knows it.”

Steve looks at Sam, sandwiched with Natasha between Bucky and Clint, and asks with his eyes,  _ do I know that? _

Bucky is gesturing with his spoon now, drops of mint chip ice cream threatening to fly off and ruin the couch with every move he makes. “ _ Lemonade _ was overrated and not even accessible to anyone without $20 or a Tidal subscription, and God, did anyone even listen to  _ Everything Is Love _ ?”

Clint throws his hands in the air. “ _ Lemonade _ was not overrated, you jackass, I swear you're being such a -”

Steve tunes out of the - um -  _ discussion  _ to pay some attention to the TV, searching for  _ some  _ kind of context. When he’s met with nothing but a Coors commercial and something about cat food, his eyes fall back on Bucky beside him.

“You’re so full of shit, Barton,” Bucky laughs, right in Clint’s face, with chocolate chip-stained teeth, “I’m sorry, but you can’t call Beyoncé the queen of breakup songs when she still hasn’t left that rat bastard of a husband -”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Bucky, I’m saying  _ Sorry  _ is more powerful than  _ Thank U, Next _ , which it  _ is  _ -”

“They’re not even in the same  _ league  _ -”

“Like hell they’re not, you’re just pissed Ariana could never write a line like  _ Becky with the good hair _ .”

Bucky’s favourite thing about the 21st century - other than, obviously, being alive to see it - is pop culture. Steve’s seen him name and explain the lives of every Kardashian and Jenner alive more than once - once to an unlucky reporter who wanted to know how he’s settling into modern life, twice to Thor, and once to an old guy sticking his nose up at a photo of North West-Kardashian in a magazine at the supermarket.

Bucky laughs again, and it’s the best sound Steve’s ever heard. “You’re out of your goddamn mind, man. And I would know.”

Clint huffs out a laugh at that, and gives him a tiny salute. “So would I.”

 

* * *

 

  1. **gossip**



 

Bucky slams the front door and vaults over the couch. Steve nearly jumps out of his skin.

“You will never guess what Clint told me today,” Bucky says, so confidently that Steve thinks maybe he  _ won’t  _ ever guess.

God, but when was the last time he heard Bucky talk like that? When was the last time he came home to Steve, bursting with a story he heard from one of the guys down at the docks or some lady at the newspaper stand?

He gets this look in his eye, one he hasn’t had since he came back, and Steve is thrown back in time, 17 years old in his sickbed waiting for Bucky to come home with some scandal he heard from Mrs Kelly down the hall.

He’s always been like that, though. Even when they were kids and there weren’t any real celebrities, not like the ones today, Bucky was a terrible gossip.

What’s worse is he was a flirt, too, and that only enabled him. He’d flutter his lashes and flash that smile of his, the one that sits crooked and charming on his face and got him and Steve out of trouble more times than either of them could count, and he’d have the whole of Brooklyn in the palm of his hand.

“What is it, Buck?” Steve says, and he has to fight to keep the grin off his face.

Bucky takes a long pause - always one for the dramatics - and Steve finds himself leaning forward, into his space. Maybe he shouldn’t, maybe it’s too soon to be this close, but Bucky doesn’t jump back or push him away, so maybe it’s okay. Maybe it’s okay to be near enough that he can feel Bucky’s breath on his skin.

And then he’s talking, fast and animated and ignoring - or maybe not noticing - the shine of metal every time he gestures with his left hand.

Steve is really only half-listening, but god, does he love to watch. He nods and asks questions in the right places, even gasps a couple of times, but he’s not so much hanging on Bucky’s every word as he is just hanging on  _ Bucky. _

“You’re not even listening, are you?” Bucky says after a straight minute of Steve just looking at the way his hair falls when it’s tucked behind his ears like that.

“Not even a little bit,” Steve says, and Bucky laughs. “Sam told me the same story two days ago. I didn’t want to spoil your fun.”

Bucky laughs again. “Like you haven’t been doing that since 1931.”

And then they’re swapping stories they’ve heard from Natasha and Tony and Bruce and the Parker kid, and it could almost actually be 1931 again.

 

* * *

  
  


The commercials are over - okay, so maybe they didn’t have television in the 30’s and he didn’t get to watch any of it in the last 70 years, and maybe this is a weird thing to be mad about, all things considered, but Bucky swears they’re a million years long - and then Jimmy Fallon is introducing his next guest. 

“Is she the one with the Christmas song?” Steve asks when Mariah Carey walks on stage, because he likes to pretend he doesn’t know as much as he does. “Little early for that, isn’t it?”

He thinks the rest of them don’t notice when he plays up the clueless Man Out Of Time act, but Bucky always knows. Sometimes, he thinks it’s just out of laziness, that Steve can’t be bothered to form an opinion on something new so he’ll pretend he doesn’t know what it is.

“So help me God, I am going to strangle you,” Clint half-yells.

“Christmas starts in October now,” Bucky says, low and just for Steve, “so, technically, we’re late to the game already.”

The various scripted adventures of affordable celebrities are forgotten, mostly, once Sam finds his way into the liquor cabinet. Well -  _ Steve  _ calls it the liquor cabinet. Bucky calls it the random collection of bottles they’ve been given over the last two years.

They’re back around the dinner table again, the TV completely abandoned, when Natasha drains her wine glass - that hasn’t had any wine in it for an hour - and asks, “Stark’s New Year’s Party?”

Sam scoffs. “I wasn’t invited.”

“You can be my plus one,” Bucky says. He leans across the table to reach for a bottle of something transparent with a label in Russian and tops up Natasha’s glass, and then his own. His hair is messy and his lips are shiny and his cheeks are a little bit pink, but his smile is wide and elastic when he sits back again, and rests his head against the shoulder of the arm Steve has slung across the back of his chair.

“I don’t get an invite, but Robocop over here does?” Sam protests.

“No, Bucky’s my plus one,” Steve says.

Sam nods wisely. “In that case, this situation makes perfect sense.”

“Plus ones don’t get plus ones,” Clint says. He hiccups then, and that’s what the group latches onto, rather than the point he’s trying to make.

 

* * *

 

  1. **party**



 

“It’s nothing big,” Tony says, gesturing wildly with a screwdriver, “really, just a little get together. Earth’s mightiest heroes only.”

“I’m sure,” Steve says. He locks eyes with Bucky then, and he knows they’ve got the same thought running through their heads: No Stark has ever thrown a small party.

“I even sent Thor a raven,” Tony continues. “Taxidermied and by FedEx, since he’s bunking with Bruce now, but I’m sure he’ll appreciate the sentiment.”

Steve cocks an eyebrow at him, and takes another sip of the god awful coffee one of Stark Tower’s resident semi-sentient machines made. He can feel the chill in the stare Bucky gives Tony. He doesn’t let anyone but himself know that it’s the same stare Bucky gave him just this morning for not replacing the shampoo when he got out of the shower.

Tony finally relents. “Fine, I’ll shorten the guestlist. Two hundred, maximum.”

Steve considers this for a moment, but it’s Bucky who speaks. “A hundred.”

“One-fifty.”

Bucky makes a quiet  _ hmm  _ sound. “One-twenty-five, and you let us into your good whiskey.”

“One-forty, and you and the Star Spangled Man get unlimited access to the DJ.”

“Deal.”

They shake on it, and the look Bucky throws him after gives Steve the weirdest feeling he’s witnessed the birth of something diabolical.

 

The party itself, about a week later, is not the den of scandal and debauchery that a small part of Steve expected it to be. It is - and he hates to admit it - almost  _ classy. _

There’s suited waiters wandering around with trays of champagne and what Steve thinks is probably some kind of shellfish, a low-hanging chandelier he  _ swears  _ wasn’t here last week, and a live jazz band. The whole affair is reminiscent of something, he knows it, he just isn’t quite sure what.

“Stark swindled us,” Bucky says, tapping his fingers on the bar to the beat of the bass. “He can’t give us control of the DJ if there isn’t one.”

“You want me to write him a strongly worded letter?” Steve asks. He sidles up next to Bucky to free up some space around a bar stool a skinny old guy’s been eyeing up for the past couple of minutes. Bucky laughs, barely audible over the sound of smooth clarinet, and Steve feels it deep in his chest.

“Least they could do is play some real jazz,” he says, and Bucky laughs again, and lays a restless hand at the small of Steve’s back to steady himself. He orders two whiskeys from the bartender - an actual person for once, and not one of Tony’s robotic hands - and they drink in companionable silence. Bucky’s hand stays where it is, a barely-there touch Steve can feel through three layers of his suit, burning.

When Bucky slips away a little while later, Steve pretends he doesn’t notice until he’s back again, with a hand stretched out in invitation.

“What is this?” Steve asks him. He hopes to whatever god is listening that the ever-softening lighting masks the redness blooming in his cheeks. There’s nothing to be done about the grin that makes his face ache.

“I had a word with the band,” Bucky says, and there’s that smile, lopsided and charming. “Come swing with me.”

Steve takes his hand - burning, burning - and drags him to the dancefloor Tony promised he wouldn’t even have. Bucky nods to a trumpet player and the band picks up into a lindy hop no one else in the building is old enough to know how to dance to.

“You know,” Steve says, “swinging means something different now. People hear you say that, they’ll talk.”

“You know,” Bucky says, with one hand skirting Steve’s waist and the other spinning him out away from him, “I don’t really care.”

Bucky spins him back in again, and dips him, just far enough for their chests to crash together when Steve comes back up. Breathless and lightheaded and on fire everywhere their skin touches, Steve can’t find it in himself to care, either.

 

* * *

  
  


The conversation turns serious a little after midnight - or as close to serious as Clint’s shiny red face will allow. It does not last long.

“How’s therapy going, Bucky?” Natasha asks, in a way that says she’s only  _ maybe  _ looking for intel.

“C’mon, Nat -” Steve starts to say, but a metal hand on his thigh stops him.

“It’s going okay,” Bucky tells her. “We’re working on figuring out my quiet days. She thinks it’s the HYDRA programming still making me feel like I need permission to speak. I think it’s just a lack of intelligent conversation.”

He’s got that gleam in his eye, the one Steve would die a thousand times to see everyday, when he finishes, “I mean, look who I’m spending my life with.”

The word  _ life  _ slips under Steve’s skin and buries itself deep in his chest, somewhere behind his ribcage. He feels his expression start to go soft, his resolve starting to melt, and stops himself.

Steve gives Sam a dirty look for laughing -  _ giggling _ \- and says, too loudly, “You know, Buck, the couch is actually pretty comfortable. I’ve taken a couple of naps there, it’s really not bad. Maybe you can test it out tonight?”

Bucky gives him a very different kind of dirty look, then, and says, out loud and a little slurred, “I thought we’d test out something else tonight, but if you don’t want -”

And boy, does that shut Steve up real fast.

Sam slides Bucky’s glass along the table and away from him. “You’re cut off. Possibly forever. No one’s testing anything out while I’m in the spare room.”

Steve presses his nose into Bucky’s hair - the scent of coconut shampoo makes him feel drunker than the vodka on the table ever could - and whispers, “Buzzkill.”

They break out the cards for a little while, until Sam and Steve realise that poker against two assassins and Clint Barton with his hearing aids off isn’t exactly a fair game. No one wants to play chess against Steve and his brain built for war, and Sam is the only one knows enough about anything to play a decent game of Trivial Pursuit, so they decide to retire the idea of board games completely.

Until next time, anyway, when they’ve all forgotten about what happened tonight.

 

* * *

 

  1. **comfort**



 

There’s a series of  _ thumps _ , and then a hoarse shout, and then nothing. And then - 

The first couple of sounds made Bucky stir, but it’s the scream that jolts him awake.

_ This is a very complex nightmare,  _ he thinks, for just a moment, before he’s up and running out the door and five paces down the hall to Steve’s room, where the screaming hasn’t stopped.

There’s a second where Steve doesn’t recognise him, and just keeps screaming, but then something clicks and he falls silent.

“Bucky?” he says, his voice too tiny and too similar to how it was on that bridge in D.C.

“I’m here,” Bucky says, and in a flash, he is. He’s right by Steve’s side, kneeling next to the bed. Steve reaches out to turn on the lamp on the locker, but Bucky’s left hand gets there first, so he ends up latching onto Bucky’s wrist. The metal shines, golden in the lamplight.

“Bucky,” Steve says again, like a prayer. Absently, Bucky thinks he’s heard it like that before, only he was strapped down and forced to be a Nazi’s science project and convinced he was hallucinating the giant with his best friend’s face.

Steve answers the question on Bucky’s face before he can ask it. “Azzano.”

Steve could’ve been seeing anything - Bucky on the table, a hundred prisoners in glorified birdcages, the warehouse self-destructing, a balance beam that shouldn’t have held, a jump no one else could have made.

Bucky sees Azzano too, sometimes. Always losing Steve to the fire, again and again, while he’s stuck on that runway, frozen.

“Tell me what you need,” Bucky says. That’s what Steve says to him every other night, when he wakes up with a chill in his veins and a knife in his hand.

What a pair they make.

“I need,” Steve starts, then stops himself, unsure.

His grip on Bucky’s wrist is like a vice.

“I need you to stay,” he says. His voice is just shy of pained, and Bucky aches to touch him, to protect him from the world that did this to him.

Bucky starts to breathe again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“No -” Steve huffs out a sigh. “I need you to stay  _ here. _ ”

Bucky shifts, twists his arm to hold Steve’s hand in his own. He looks him dead in the eye and says again, “I’m not going anywhere.”

He never would, if he could help it. Seventy years away from the only thing that ever really kept him sane will do that to a person.

So he stays. He shoves Steve over to make room for him in the bed, and pulls him tight against his chest, the same way Steve does for him. It is, invariably, the last time either of them moves until sunlight streams through the curtains in the morning.

“Thank you,” Steve whispers, a little while later.

“You don’t have to thank me, Steve,” Bucky tells him. “You never have to thank me.”

For a moment, silence. Bucky nearly drifts off.

Then, “Thank you for  _ staying, _ Buck.”

He pretends not to hear, because he know Steve didn’t mean to say it. If he also pretends not to hold on a little tighter, or to press his lips to Steve’s hair, then that’s his own business.

 

* * *

  
  


Goodbyes take a while. They always do, in their line of work. 

Natasha isn’t really one for hugs, or so Steve has been told, but she clings to him a moment longer than he expects. He tells her to stay safe, and she pats his cheek.

“We both know that’s not going to happen, Rogers,” she says, but the sad smile on her lips is a clear promise that she’ll try.

He doesn’t know when he’ll see her again. He doesn’t know  _ if _ he’ll see her again. This is a fact that cuts deeper every time he sees her and has to say goodbye again. So he does the same thing he does every time this happens, and hugs her again.

“Don’t get yourself killed, Natasha,” he says into her hair. “I still can’t speak Russian. The funeral would be a nightmare to plan.”

She laughs; a short, breathy thing. “You worry too much.”

“You don’t worry enough,” he tells her, and lets her go.

Clint is hovering just behind her, waiting his turn. Steve tries not to laugh, but doesn’t try very hard. Clint pulls him in, roughly, and with more strength than Steve really thought he could have after all he drank.

“Take care of her for me,” Steve tells him.

“You know,” Clint says, a smile in his voice, “Barnes said the same thing to Natasha about me.”

“We like to keep all our bases covered,” Steve says. “Just in case.”

The door buzzes then, and there’s a rush to get coats and scarves on - why Clint and Natasha think that’ll make them presentable to the cab driver in their current state of inebriation, Steve will never know - and then they’re out the door, and promising to call, even though they almost never do.

 

* * *

 

  1. **kiss**



 

Bucky goes for the knee, and Steve goes for the throat, and the sparring mats shift and -

Bucky is going down, down, down, and there’s panic in his eyes Steve hasn't seen since a train in the mountains in 1944.

And just like it did in the Alps, everything happens in slow motion.

“Shit, Buck-”

It’s not a long way down, but god, the split second before Steve grabs Bucky’s hand - flesh and blood and not cold, it’s not cold, there’s no ice,  _ it’s not cold _ \- feels like a year.

Steve’s grip is strong, but gravity and Bucky’s momentum are stronger. Bucky barely has a chance to warn him - “Steve, I-” is all he can spit out - before Steve is tumbling down on top of him, chest to chest, neither of them with any air in their lungs, gasping.

There’s a moment, when they’re both breathing again but still a pile of limbs and bruises, where Steve feels Bucky shaking under him, and thinks he’s crying.

He lifts himself up to look at him, with one hand on either side of Bucky’s head, and sees what might be the dumbest smile he’s ever witnessed - including the time when they were thirteen years old and Steve tripped on the sidewalk and got ice cream all over his face.

Their eyes lock.

Bucky’s smile drops, just a little. His eyes flick to Steve’s mouth - and back up. Steve’s tongue peeks out to wet his lips, and Bucky looks down again.

“Steve,” he says, his voice somewhere between a croak and a whisper.

All of a sudden, the laughter in Bucky’s eyes is gone, replaced instead by a kind of intensity Steve’s never seen in them before. His heartbeat is non-stop machine gun fire, a jackhammer on a Manhattan sidewalk, a freight train going a mile a minute.

Their eyes lock, but this time it’s different.

There’s a misfire somewhere in Steve’s brain, in whatever part usually stops him from thinking too loudly about how he feels when he sees Bucky, that tells him what he’s about to do is a good idea.

He leans down, just the tiniest bit, and -

Bucky surges upwards, and they crash together, noses and teeth and lips all caught in the crossfire.

The force of it knocks Steve off balance again, and Bucky rolls them so that Steve is flat on his back, and the idea of that alone has Steve grasping with both hands for any part of Bucky he can get a hold of.

One hand finds the hem of Bucky’s shirt and grabs a fistful of fabric. The other lands on the side of his face, right where his jaw meets his cheek, and unconsciously swipes a thumb across the sharp bone there. 

Bucky  _ melts. _

The kiss is softer now, less forceful, less desperate. There’s an earnestness about it that makes something in Steve’s chest flutter. He frees his hand from Bucky’s shirt, only to tangle it again in his hair. A gasp escapes from Bucky’s lips, and he breaks away.

Steve hasn’t felt breathlessness like this since he was a four-foot-nothing kid who carried around two inhalers.

They look at each other for a moment - maybe it’s awe, maybe it’s disbelief - without saying anything at all, their faces barely inches apart.

“I guess that’s one way to end a fight,” Bucky says.

Steve laughs, and pulls him back down.

 

**Author's Note:**

> catch me on twitter @nebulastucky or tumblr @macdenlesbian


End file.
